


A Brush of Cold Air

by draculard



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Compliant, Eddie Loves Barry Manilow, Ghosts, Hurt/Comfort, Loneliness, M/M, Memory Loss, Not Actually Unrequited Love, life after death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-18 23:01:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22867915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: After Derry, the Losers gradually forget each other again. Richie goes back to his normal life with no memory of the friends he's left behind.Eddie does his best to remind him.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 1
Kudos: 36





	A Brush of Cold Air

He’s already tired when his coworkers  — for some reason, he can’t force himself to think of them as ‘friends’  — drag him to the club. They’re all dressed well except for Richie, all of them trying to pull.

Richie, meanwhile, leans against the bar in his wrinkled t-shirt and old windbreaker and stares down at his own reflection in the polished surface. He sees tangled hair and thick stubble. He sees bags beneath his eyes.

He’s pretty confident he’s not gonna pull.

For some reason, this thought fills him with relief. He orders a Jack-and-Coke and sips it, watching as his coworkers scatter across the club, losing them in the crowd.

When they’re out of sight, he can finally relax. Something about them feels wrong. The shape of them when they’re all together  — it feels like they’re all the wrong heights, all the wrong sizes. The number feels off, too, and when he looks at them, for half a second he finds himself automatically searching for red hair. When he doesn’t find it, it feels like something is missing.

He can’t explain it, so he banishes it from his mind. He sips his drink, he lets his mind wander.

And when a woman approaches him, he doesn’t notice her.

She clears her throat. He glances her way, assesses the situation.

Obviously, he’s not interested. He wishes he were  — she’s cute, objectively, with dark hair and a pleasant face. Not drop-dead gorgeous, but neither is he. She smiles at him, tilts her head.

“Hey,” she says.

Richie feels his stomach roll. 

“Hey,” he replies. The word comes out flat, sounding almost like a cough. His voice feels rusty.

“You here all by yourself?” the woman asks.

She never receives an answer. By the time she hits the word ‘here,’ Richie’s thinking, Oh Christ, I can’t do this. By the time she hits ‘all,’ he’s abandoning his half-full drink on the counter. His stomach twists; his throat tightens.

By the time she gets to ‘yourself,’ he’s walking away.

Outside, after he vomits, he tries to push down what he’s feeling  — a mixture of disgust and despair that seems strangely familiar, even though he’s surely never felt it before. He calls a cab with the taste of bile clinging to his tongue and lips. There’s sweat beading on his forehead when the taxi pulls up and he half-falls into the backseat.

He doesn’t tell his coworkers he’s leaving.

* * *

It takes the cab an hour to reach Richie’s apartment. By the time he stumbles up the stairs and through the front door, he feels emptied out, like his stomach has been scraped raw. Or like acid has eaten straight through his guts. His limbs are heavy, his legs shaking like he’s just run a marathon  — or, to be honest, like he’s just jogged a mile.

All he wants is A) water, to clear the parchment-paper feeling out of his throat, and B) to completely lose his mind.

The first can be achieved by grabbing a bottle of generic Wal-Mart brand water from the fridge, since the idea of taking water from the tap has, for some reason, always lowkey freaked him out.

The second can be achieved by turning on some sweet, sweet heavy metal.

After the first blissful sip of water, Richie makes his way across the room to his record collection, where all the greatest hits are waiting to be played. Just thinking about music makes him feel better; his step lightens, his muscles regenerating.

Then he reaches the record collection, grabs one off the shelf, and freezes.

“I’ve been robbed,” says Richie aloud, astonished. But no, that isn’t quite right. He holds the record in both hands and stares at the glossy photo on the cover, his mouth hanging open. “I’ve been nonconsensually  _ traded _ with.”

The record before him is not Black Sabbath, nor is it Metallica, nor is it AC/DC. It’s Barry Manilow. Barry fucking Manilow.

With numb fingers, Richie slides the record back into its spot. Its brothers, flanking it on both sides, glare out at him defiantly, the names on their spines printed in garish block letters: BARRY MANILOW. Desperately, Richie scans the collection, looking for a familiar name, for anything that isn’t the most sugary of 80s pop. His heart leaps when the endless row of Barrys give way to something a little more familiar:

Billy. Of course. Billy Idol. Okay, he can rock out to that. Rebel Yell, White Wedding — it isn’t exactly the hard shit he’d been hoping to thrash out to, but at least the robbers left him  _ one _ of his records. He slides it out of the shelf, relief already making his shoulders relax, and then freezes again when he has the album out in full view.

Billy Joel.

Billy  _ Joel? _

_ Uptown Girl??? _

“Not cool,” Richie breathes, gritting his teeth. His words are light, but there’s an intense, pounding headache forming beneath his temples. 

He looks at the record again, puts it back, and selects one of the endless Barry Manilows waiting in line.

He considers his options.

He could call the police, but what could he say? “Hey, somebody stole my bitchin’ record collection and replaced it with Barry Manilow?” Besides, Richie Tozier is no snitch.

It’s such a bizarre crime that it’s almost  — but not really  — funny. Slowly, Richie moves away from his beloved wall of records, still clutching the Manilow disc in his hand. He’s not sure what compels him to put it on the record player and lower the needle.

The dulcet, cheery tones of _Copacabana_ fill the room. Somewhere behind him, Richie swears he hears a contented hum.

“This is fine,” Richie says.

* * *

He finds an aspirator on top of his notes for tonight’s show. The plastic casing is dented and grubby, with fingerprints all over it and little scratches from where it’s been dropped on the ground. It looks well-loved, Richie thinks, or maybe well-hated, like whoever owned it spent a whole lot of time kicking it across the ground like a hacky-sack.

He’s never seen it before in his life.

Possibly he picked it up off the ground at some point, absent-mindedly, though he can’t imagine why he would ever do that. It’s not like he typically collects pre-loved medical supplies (though sure, like any well-adjusted middle-aged man, he’s collected his fair share of Doogie Howser DVDs, which is sort of the same thing). So maybe somebody asked him to hold it during yesterday’s rehearsals for SNL — he can’t imagine who — and in the hustle and bustle of preparations, he stuffed it in his pocket, promptly forgot about it, and carried it home.

He’s sure he’ll never find out who owned it, so he scoops it up without a thought and holds it over the trash can to drop it in.

To drop it.

_ Drop it, _ he tells himself.

His fingers refuse to open.

_ Okay, _ thinks Richie, staring at his hand, nonplussed. He loosens his grip — or tries to — but his fingers stay firmly closed over the aspirator. He can’t force them to let go. He bends his arm, forcing his hand closer and closer to the gaping mouth of the bin, and watches as his knuckles turn white. The plastic casing of the aspirator cracks beneath his hand.

And still he can’t force his fingers to open, can’t bring himself to throw the damn piece of junk away. 

He takes a deep breath. He backs away from the trash can, eyebrows furrowed, glasses slipping low on his nose.

He can’t throw it away. That much is clear. It doesn’t make sense, but it’s true nonetheless.

So maybe he’ll keep it.

* * *

It’s not unusual to feel a slight dip in the mattress while he’s trying to sleep. It’s so normal for him that Richie barely thinks about it.

Eyes half-closed, glasses off, face puffy with sleep or the lack thereof, he watches as the edge of the bed compresses, weighed down by something or someone Richie can’t see.

A ghost cat, he likes to imagine. The ghost of some stray he hit with his car, perhaps. He can’t think of anything else that could be haunting him.

What’s strangest about it is that seeing the mattress dip like that, even in the middle of the night, never fills Richie with fear. There’s something comforting about it, something familiar. Something that makes his chest ache and his eyes burn, until all he can do is bury his face in the pillow and force himself not to think about it, to pretend it isn’t there.

He feels a brush of cold air against his exposed hands.

He hides them under the blanket.

The feeling goes away. 


End file.
